John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 15 - The Turquoise Lament

by The Turquoise Lament(lit)

  By dawn she was exhausted, spiritless, leaden. She made terrible coffee. I moved the Flush to sand shallows, went over the side, pulled the bent wheel and put the spare on. I ran the Flush from the fly bridge, and she went way forward and sat out there on the bow hatch, huddled small and miserable. Even her round little behind in her white sailcloth shorts looked humble and defeated. But there was something in the curve of hip into waist, and waist into back and shoulder, that made a little stir of lech and regret. It is always a tossup with me as to whether I am sorriest for my misdeeds or the deeds undone. In a world intent on defusing sex, I had failed to do my part. I'd let a classic get away.

  We got to Dinner Key at ten o'clock and I saw Lewellen pacing back and forth over near the gas dock. I took it over there and sent Pidge forward with her little blue flight bag and waved off any help with lines. I had no intention of tying up. I held it steady and she stepped ashore and trotted to Daddy. A little cluster of boat bums watched her with appreciation. I guess she had been planning it all the way to Dinner Key. She wheeled away from his grasp and spun and pointed an accusing finger at me, and in a high, clear, artificial tone, she said, "Daddy, do you know what he did to me? Do you want to know what Travis did? All night long, all he did was sc..."

  By then Ted Lewellen had read the scene, detected the revenge wish of the maiden scorned, and understood how it was a perfect affirmation of my innocence. I was boiling back away from the dock, widening the gap. He clamped a hand gently over her mouth just in time, and she collapsed into his arms. He gave me a half-shy grin, a shrug, and led her away toward the parking lot.

  Pretty soon she was eighteen and had gone away to school.

  And here, years later, five time zones away, the lady and I embraced. Then broke it up quickly and clumsily. Old restraints are a memory in the flesh. She had a faint blush, a half smile, and spoke quickly, "Just this bag? Is this all you have? Sure. I remember. You always feel oppressed by things. Hemmed in and all. I hope you didn't find a place to stay. But you couldn't have unless you made a reservation from California. Help me stop gibbering, please."

  "Hush up, Linda Lewellen Brindle, dear."

  "Thanks."

  "Want to talk later? Or now."

  "Now. Come over here."

  She took me over to a window. She had me lean close to the glass. From there I could see a segment of the forest of spars in the Yacht Harbor. She showed me where to start counting. Six berths over. And there, eleven stories below us and a half mile away, was the distinctive bulk of the Trepid.

  "Where's Howie?" I asked.

  "Living aboard."

  "And you're living here?"

  "For a month so far," she said. "It belongs to my best friend in school. She's back on the mainland to be with her mother, who's dying of cancer."

  "Let me guess. Am I here to save a marriage?" She dropped onto an orange sofa and touched her throat. "Not exactly, Trav."

  "Then?"

  "It's narrowed down to just two things that could be happening to me. Just two things. I am losing my mind. Or Howie is going to kill me."

  It was a mind-boggling thought. "Howie? D. Howard Brindle, for chrissake!"

  She looked at me most solemnly, and I saw the two simultaneous tears bulge large on her lower lids, then spill over and make shiny little snail tracks down her cheeks in an edge of light from the window.

  "I keep trying to make it come out that it's the first thing. I want to believe I'm losing my mind. But I can't believe it. Then I say that people who are crazy can never believe they are, and that means I probably am. I just can't..." And then came slow bow of the face into the hands, lowering of the hands, and head to the lady-knees, brown hair hanging long, gleaming with life.

  She made a soft, snuffling sound. Okay McGee, salvage expert, salvage the lady's life. Give her a choice. Crazy or dead.

  Howie Brindle? Howie? Come on, Pidge. Now really.

  Two

  I WALKED out to the Hawaii Yacht Club at the end of the long pier. A fellow looked at my membership card from the Royal Biscayne and straightened perceptibly. Yes, of course, any member of the Royal Biscayne has reciprocal privileges, sir.

  I said I was just looking to see if any Florida friends were in port. He sent me to the dockmaster, who showed me the big map of the protected boat basin on the side wall of his office and told me to take a look. The tags for stateside boats were fastened to the cork board with pale blue pushpins.

  Nobody I knew well. Three big boats I knew, and one I didn't. The large money has the full-time hired crew to go with the large boat, and the rich have the crew make the long runs. They fly out later. Like old McKimber. Now dead. He used to keep a crew of six aboard the Missy III. One hundred and fifteen feet. Seven hundred thousand gleaming dollars afloat and a minimum hundred thou a year wages and running expenses. He'd send it where he wanted to go. Portugal, the Riviera, the Greek Islands, Papeete, Acapulco. Then he would fly out and go aboard and stay for a time, accompanied by one of those big, blond, jolly ladies of his. But he never cruised in the Missy III. It made him too nervous. He didn't like to wake up in the night and hear all that creaking and crackling and sloshing.

  So I made a sound of pleasure at spotting the Trepid and asked the dockmaster if the Brindles were aboard, and he said that as far as he knew it was just the mister staying aboard her. I thanked him and went to say hello to Good Old Howie.

  The Trepid was well laced into her U-shaped slip, stern to the pier, with husky stern lines crossed to the big bollards, bow lines to the pilings, and a pair of spring lines to big cleats on the narrow dock on the starboard. A short gangplank had been rigged, and I went to the dock end of it and yelled, "Howie? You aboard?"

  He rose up from the far side of the trunk cabin, where he had a deck chair centered under the shade of a tarp. He stared at me for an uncomprehending second, and then his big face broke into familiar groupings of grin-wrinkles, teeth white against tan hide, brown eyes looking misty with pleasure.

  "McGee! Son of a gun! What are you doing out here, man? Come on aboard."

  I had planned my explanation so that it was neither too elaborate nor too vague. And entirely plausible. Hand delivery of a legal document, and get the certified check before turning it over. A wellpaid favor for a friend of a friend.

  He got me a cold beer from below. We sat in the shade of the tarp, amid boat smells and marina sounds. He wore faded red swim trunks. I had forgotten the size of him. Almost eye to eye with my six four, but a McGee and a half wide. About two seventy, I would guess. Practically no body hair. A soft slack look to the smooth tanned hide. But do not be misled. There is a physical iype which has a layer of smooth fat over very useful muscle. Hard, rubbery fat. Big men, light on their feet, agile, and very tough. You find a lot of them in the pro football ranks. Linemen and linebackers. I had played volleyball with Howie on a Lauderdale beach. Set the net up in soft loose sand on a blazing day and some very good specimens crap out on you quickly. I fool with it only when I'm in top shape, which seems to happen less often these years. The regulars were glad to have a new fish in the game, and they tried to run him into the ground. But old Howie Brindle kept bounding tirelessly, sweating, laughing, yelping, making great saves and going high for the kill. He didn't even breathe hard.

  Later, one night, the week before he married Pidge, he told me about his skimpy football career. Because of disciplinary problems, he had played in only three games out of nine his senior year at Gainesville. He was a defensive tackle. He wasn't anybody's draft choice, but the Dolphins gave him an invitation to camp.

  There under the stars on the sun deck of the Flush, he said, "Those coaches kept chewing at me, Trav. They kept saying what a shame it was, somebody with all my natural equipment and talent, I didn't have enough resolve. I wasn't hungry enough. What they want, you should keep getting again and chasing that ball carrier even after you know you haven't a hope in hell of ever catching him. It just didn't make sense to me. Give me an angle an
d I could lay it on them a heavy ton, like I fell off a roof on them. It doesn't make a lot of difference now, I guess. I'll say this. It all seemed pretty bush for a bunch of pros to want that kind of nonsense from somebody."

  So now he asked about Meyer and the Alabama Tiger, Johnny Dow and Chookie and Arthur, and all the Bahia Mar regulars. And then I said, "Where's Pidge? Off shopping?" Pidge and I had decided I might get a better reading if he believed I had not yet talked to her.

  He looked down at one of his big banana-fingered hands, made a slack fist of it, then inspected the nails. "She's not living aboard," he said at last.

  "Trouble?" I asked.

  I was given a quick troubled, brown-eyed glance. "Lots," he said.

  "It happens. Snits and tizzies. You two guys will straighten it out."

  "I don't know. It isn't the kind of thing... I mean... I just really don't know what the hell to do, Trav. I don't know how to handle it. And I don't even want to talk about it, okay?"

  "What do you mean, is it okay? If you want to talk I'm here. If you want me to go talk to her, that's okay too. Is she on Oahu?"

  He grimaced, lifted a big arm, and pointed. "She's on the eleventh floor of that place over there; about half of it sticks out to the side of that brown build ing. Kaiulani Towers. Apartment eleven-twelve. Some girl friend from school, name of Alice Dorck. It's her place and she's away."

  "What will I say to her?"

  "I didn't say I wanted you to-"

  He was interrupted by a hail from the dock. "Hey, Howie? I'm ready to unstep the big stick. Your muscles still available?"

  "Okay Jer. Coming," he called in a cheerful voice. He stood up and said, "This'll take maybe twenty minutes. You in any kind of a rush?"

  "I'll be here."

  He grinned and went padding off on his big bare brown feet. His streaked blond-brown hair was shoved back and cropped off square, just below the nape of his neck. He had lost the front third of his hair, all of it. It gave him a huge area of face, all of it a deepwater tan. Apparently he was a very obliging guy around the yacht harbor just as he had been around Bahia Mar. The muscles were always available.

  I strolled the deck areas of the Trepid. I wanted the pleasure of a good, long, quiet look at her. It is so damned trite to say that they don't build them like that any more. They can still build them, if there's anybody left with money like that. The anticipated pleasure slowly faded and died. I did not enjoy looking at the Trepid. Let me explain about a boat person, one like me who is always a step behind or a step and a half behind the normal maintenance chores aboard the Busted Flush. The Trepid was sound and good, and she would have looked just great to a civilian.

  Her lines are quite a lot like the forty-six-foot Rhodes Fiberglass Motorsailor, vintage 1972, but the Trepid has ten feet more length, six feet more beam, and in spite of a dead-weight tonnage nearly twice that of the Rhodes, actually draws a little less when that big beefy centerboard is wound all the way up into its slot in the hull. She is a husky boat, built like a workboat, and if you want to use a small jib like a staysail and go on diesels, she can give you almost three thousand miles at eight or nine knots, depending on the condition of her hull at the time.

  What I saw was dry, corroding running gear and blocks which looked as if they might be frozen by corrosion. I saw pitted metal, flaking paint, smudges and stains, milky cracking varnish, oily spots on the teak deck, and a speckly green on the sail cover which could be the beginning of a fatal case of mildew. Everywhere I looked I saw hundreds of hours of undone labor, and very dull labor it is. The sea has no mercy, and there is no such thing as "maintenance-free." All you get near the water is either more maintenance than you can handle, or so much that you can just about stay ahead of it. The fee I pay for living aboard the Flush is a minimum of two hours a day for exterior housework every day I am aboard.

  The Trepid was like a large, healthy, handsome woman who had been forced to sleep in her clothes and go without comb, soap or makeup for a couple of weeks. She was still sound, but her morale had started to go sour.

  Not like when she was Ted Lewellen's lady. Not the way she was treated when Meyer and I flew out and lived aboard the Trepid anchored in sheltered water in Pitchilingue Cove in the Bay of La Paz in Baja California. There were five of us aboard. Beside Ted, there was Joe Delladio, a Mexican electronics engineer, and ftank Hayes, a construction engineer and scuba expert.. Maybe Lewellen wouldn't have brought me into his action even then, but I guess that I was the only one he could think of when two of the minor partners in his venture decided they could no longer keep on pretending they were not afraid of sharks. And three men could not do all the work which had to be done before the good season changed. At my suggestion, Meyer became the other replacement.

  It was in the big salon of the Trepid the evening of the day we arrived that Ted told us about his past, about all the research and about the treasure clues he had found in the old original documents, the ships' logs, officers' letters.

  He explained what he was after this time. The information had come out of the archives in Madrid and in Amsterdam. Long ago a Dutch pirate ship had knocked off a series of Spanish galleons and had loaded herself down with more treasure than was prudent. She had been intercepted by Cromwell, who was also a pirate at that time, in command of two English vessels. They caught the Dutchman north northeast of La Paz Bay, which is near the tip of Baja California, on the sheltered side.

  The Dutchman had not surrendered very quietly and, in the fuss, was holed at the waterline. Cromwell took the dismasted hulk in tow and tried to make it to the shallows, but she sank well offshore. Some of the Hollanders escaped to shore, probably not more than a dozen, and two eventually made it back to their homeland. Professor Lewellen estimated that the pirate ship had been laden with about twelve million in gold and silver. He had used Spanish sources to get a reading. From English and Dutch accounts of the confrontation, he had prepared an overlay of a geodetic chart of the area, with the search area marked out.

  He explained we weren't looking for some romantic old vessel resting on the bottom. Tides and currents would have shifted her and broken her up a long time ago. Somewhere in the shaded areas of the overlay, she would have burst herself open like a rotten sack and dumped the heavy metal. The area was silt and sand bottom, constantly shifting. We would be working at a depth range of seventy to a hundred and thirty feet.

  "I believe the heavy metal would stay pretty well bunched, no matter what happened to the ship. I think that her cannon will be in the same area as the precious metals. All I'll say about the search method is that it involves exhausting, gut-busting labor. And we may never find anything. If you decide against it, I'll pay your fare back, no complaints, no questions, no pleading. If you decide for it, then the cut works this way. After we take the expenses off the top, fifty percent comes to me and the vessel. Of the remaining fifty percent, Joe and Frank get sixteen percent each, and you and Meyer get nine percent each. If we cashed in at two million net, that would be ninety thousand apiece for you. If we get nothing, you've been nonpaying guests, and manual labor."

  I looked at Meyer. Meyer had pursed his lips, beetled his brow, and said, "How did you become owner of this fine vessel, Professor Ted?"

  "Just lucky, I guess."

  "Meyer's question is pertinent," I reminded Lewellen.

  He stared directly at me, and I have a vivid memory of that look. He had seemed a mild and gentle fellow, professorial, meticulous and fussy. He looked out at me from under sun-whitened lashes and eyebrows. Once upon a time I rescued a great blue heron. Some cretinous subhuman had busted his wing with a small-caliber slug. After I had run him down and quelled him with my right arm wrapped around the surprising lightness of wings and body, my left hand holding that long lethal bill, he held still and looked at me, unblinking. It was the predator appraisal. How would I taste? Was I worth killing and eating? A pale calm yellow stare, devoid of fear.

  Lewellen shrugged and turned slightly
, and the look was hidden, but in that few moments he had become quite another person to me.

  "You have a right to ask for batting averages," he said. "There were three sites in the Bahamas. Pidge and I worked them, aboard the Lumpy. We were empty on one of them. We got sixteen hundred pounds of silver ingots from another. We took seven hundred pounds of gold coin minted in Mexico from the third. We stopped when some strangers began to take an interest-the new government in Nassau has a nasty habit of taking a hundred percent as its cut. I researched the clandestine market in numismatic rarities. It's of no moment to you gentlemen how and when I can turn such finds into usable cash. All you need to know is that I can do it... if we find anything. And I rather think we will. That gold, part of it, made it possible to buy the Trepid."